Are You An Evil Person For Eating Meat? - Peter Singer

my argument is not based on the idea that we should love animals or have warm feelings to them it's based on the idea that this is a major ethical issue a major ethical wrong that we are doing to those who are not members of our species it's nearly 50 years since you first published animal liberation why we release the book now well apparently because it is nearly 50 years and although I did revise it in 1990 that's still 33 years and the book isn't just you know Timeless philosophy it has some of what I hope is timeless philosophy in it but it it's applied to the real world and the Real World includes industrial animal production which is a vast industry that is terrible for animals to Planet climate Health everything but it's changed of course that industry has changed over the last uh 50 or 33 years I also talk about the use of animals in Laboratories and I described experiments that were done the last time I revised the book so experiments from the 1980s not very relevant if you want to know what's going on with animals in Labs today so those are two main reasons um lots of people ask me about well you know has have we made progress for Animals over the time since you wrote Animal Liberation um I wanted to answer that question uh and I did want to talk about climate change and its relevance to our choice of what we eat because that obviously wasn't in the 1975 Edition I had no knowledge of climate change and it was barely in the 1990 Edition either what ways do you think we've made progress with regards to animal welfare and in which ways have we gone backward we've made progress in restrictions on some of the worst forms of close confinement of animals in industrial animal production that I focused on in the earlier book so for example laying hens egg laying hens were in very small wire cages where they couldn't even stretch their wings even if they'd only been one hand per cage they couldn't have stretched their wings fully but there might be four or five hens in those cages they have been prohibited in some places so they've been prohibited in the European Union the United Kingdom has maintained those prohibitions after leaving the European Union uh some states of the United States where citizens can bring initiatives to the ballot and have a vote on them California is the largest of those States uh have also restricted those cages and as well individual stalls for veal calves and SARS where again they couldn't turn around the stores were so tight they could hardly walk a step so there are some places where those things have been banned another big form of progress is that there are many more vegetarians and vegans there were virtually no vegans when in 1975 when the book was published there are now I think supposed to be 1.3 million vegans in the United Kingdom and varying figures for the United States that uh some some surveys go much higher than that in the US so you know there's greater awareness of animals and the idea that animals might have rights is no longer a matter for ridicule as it was when the book first came out so there's lots of um ways in which we've gone ahead the big way in which we've gone backwards is that there are more animals in industrial animal production now than ever before and that's at least partly because of the rise of China and the fact that China has become a lot more prosperous you know which is great we don't want people to be in extreme poverty but um so hundreds of millions of Chinese now use the extra income that they have to buy more meat and China has been building these enormous factory farms like 26 story buildings just full of thousands and thousands of pigs obviously never getting to go outside just living their entire lives on the concrete floors of these buildings uh and because of that uh and you know expansion of other chicken production uh fish factory farming aquaculture as it's called to nicer word for what it really is um you know so there are far more animals suffering now from Human abuse than they were in 1975. I suppose that the increase in human population just means that there is a greater requirement for food so even if you've had an increase in the proportion of people that are eating vegan or vegetarian there is overall a significant more number of people who are eating full stop and regardless What proportion of those may have slightly increased to eat non-animal products a lot more will be eating animal products yes I think that's exactly right um that is what's happened uh we in some countries you know uh meat consumption is stable or even falling it's fallen in Germany and in Sweden in recent years but um it's growing in those countries where meat consumption used to be low um and so we are certainly getting more meat being produced for the people who aren't familiar with the ideas in animal Liberation what's the key overview of your argument what makes it uh different or novel or unique well my argument is not based on the idea that we should love animals or have uh warm feelings to them it's based on the idea that this is a major ethical issue a major ethical wrong that we are doing to those who are not members of our species and I argue that the kind of wrong is analogous to the more familiar wrongs that we have done in the past and to some extent are still doing such as racism and sexism so in saying that I'm not comparing the experience of animals to those of blacks or women but I am saying that what these phenomena have in common is that there is a a dominant group um it might have been those of European descent who went to Africa to buy slaves or capture slaves and enslave them it might be men who uh were able to take power from women and essentially to make women into into their property um and in this case of course it's humans as a whole who do exactly that with animals animals legally are property um everywhere in the world of you know domestic animals uh and uh we although we may treat our companion animals reasonably well with the animals that we are raising for food or using as tools for research in Laboratories they are just things for us to use they are means to our ends and we don't give their interests consideration and as long as a being can feel pain that being has interest that we ought to be taking into account and the fact that they're not members of our species doesn't in any way justify us disregarding those interests is the goal here to reduce suffering then primarily the goal is to reduce suffering yes um it's not a matter of Rights particularly it's not specifically talking about the wrongness of killing it's focused much more on the fact that any being capable of feeling pain has interests um particularly interest in not suffering and that's an interest that we violate on an absolutely vast scale we're talking about hundreds of billions of animals that humans cause suffering to by the conditions in which they raise them each year in your opinion do some animals have a different capacity for suffering yes I think the capacities for suffering vary with the nature of the species that's certainly true and we don't have great ways of comparing the suffering essentially I suppose we see it more closely in those non-human animals who either are seem to be like us because they're closely related to us like chimpanzees and bonobos and and orangutans and so on um or in those animals with whom we live like dogs and cats and some people can be very close to Horses of course so there we recognize it quite well we don't recognize it nearly so well in chickens and fish for example but we do now have and this is another important difference between 1975 we do now have a growing body of scientific research on the capacities of non-human animals to feel pain which animals feel pain what kinds of things cause them to suffer so we know a lot more about that than we we did before um but we certainly don't know everything and if you move to a species very different from us like an octopus although the behavior of the octopus shows intelligence and ability to solve problems it's not easy for us to know what an octopus is really feeling but it does seem like it's a conscious being is likely to be feeling pain and likely to be able to suffer if it's the case that different animals perhaps have different capacities for suffering does this mean that there's a hierarchy with which we should care about the suffering of different animals a human should be placed above that of a pig should be placed above that of a vole should be placed above that of a aphid well um I wouldn't put it quite like that um I think that there isn't a hierarchy in in the sense that similar amounts of pain are similarly important whether they're the pain of a human or any of the animals you just mentioned the question is what do we regard as similar amounts of pain and how do we know but um uh you know I I don't think that there's a kind of hierarchy of moral status I think that there are just questions that we need to ask about what do different species feel what do we know about the field and you know some species may feel pain more acutely than we do after all we know that many species have much more acute sense of smell dogs do they may have more acute Vision Raptors you know have incredibly sharp Vision so it's hard to say you know you can't really say well humans just feel more pain than any other animal um that's unlikely uh but yes we could say well some animals you know don't have enough neurons really perhaps to feel pain so you know maybe some of the insects don't feel pain and are more kind of like miniature robots you know maybe I I don't know but but that's possible yeah I understand I think uh oysters like bivalves and and stuff like that there's some well I guess skepticism around whether or not they can feel pretty much anything at all yes I'm skeptical about oysters because you know pain evolves so as a warning signal a signal of of danger um and beings that uh then have this capacity for pain can move away from that danger and Escape it badon oyster doesn't move um oyster just sits on a on a rock basically and um you know so it's it's hard to see why an oyster would have evolved a capacity for pain um given that you know there's there's some cost to having those those capacities you have to have uh some neural matter and uh that has to you know be fed and and whatever kept going so yeah I I don't have any objective to eating oysters um you know because I don't think they're they're sentient beings that's that's a good example of an animal that uh I don't think can feel pain what would you say to the people who believe that humans are the ones that are guiding this planet why should I care about the suffering of some non-human animal I can care if another human suffers because they're a a complex creature like me but animals are being bred they've always been bred for a very long time for our consumption this is the way that it's always been why should we be bothered about the suffering of other animals well um I don't think the fact that we uh are dominant is a reason for discounting their interests and that was also true of Europeans for example with their more advanced technology their guns so on that that we don't feel that that justified them in uh dominating other animals uh as for the fact that you know it's always been like this that's a very uh common conservative argument uh but you could also you know men could certainly have always said that uh well you know men have been the leaders of societies um you know women have needed men's permission to do things to who they marry to um to have any possessions even you know even in the 19th century in England uh a married woman did not own any property whatever property she brought into the marriage uh on the day they were married belonging to her husband so um you know if one could have said well it's been like this for a very long time but we certainly don't think that that justifies that arrangement yeah the uh marital naturalistic fallacy perhaps right yes I think that's what it is yeah um what is the typical life like of an animal that will arrive on somebody's plate in 2023 what are some of the numbers that are involved in sort of some of the experiences well the animals who we raise in the largest numbers are are fish and I'm not now talking about those fish who are captured wild from the oceans I'm talking about fish we raise in uh commercial fish I wouldn't really call them Farms commercial Fish Production um and a recent estimate of that is 124 billion fish raised every year um and and they are very closely confined they are in small you know ponds or Nets um they're some of them like salmon have an instinct to swim across the oceans uh and uh they don't have any kind of Humane Slaughter uh the other thing that's worth noting particularly uh you know suppose you buy a salmon um farm salmon is most salmon are nowadays um you're not responsible just for the life and death of that salmon that salmon had to be fed and the salmon is carnivorous so trawlers had to go in in the ocean and catch fish to be ground up low value fish to be ground up into pellets to be fed to that salmon and an estimate that I've seen says that every salmon by the time they're ready to be killed and sold has consumed uh 147 other fish in total so you're responsible for close to 150 fish being killed by the one salmon that you buy um in next in terms of numbers is chicken and something like 70 billion chicken are raised worldwide each year these chicken are sold very young they've been bred to grow extremely fast so they reach the weight that the chicken you buy in the supermarket in something like six weeks so really they're babies but there's a problem with the fact that they are bred to grow so fast uh or several problems they suffer from bone deformities because they put on weight they're incredibly obese and their bones are still immature uh and one of the problems is that their legs May collapse under them so the industry accepts something like five percent mortality in these young birds one in 20 will die and those deaths may be caused by the fact that their legs have collapsed under them they can no longer walk to food or water um nobody is going to pay them individual attention it's just not worth the cost they're too cheap there's 20 000 birds in a single shed um somebody might walk through the shed and pick up the corpses after they've died but they won't get any individual help if their legs do collapse under them and even those whose legs manage to keep them uh standing until they're ready that six weeks they're ready to be rounded up for Slaughter experts who've looked at this have said that they are in pain for the last two weeks because their body weight it hurts them just to stand but they can't really sit down either because they're living on a kind of a litter that is full of their droppings of these twenty thousand birds and maybe previous batch of birds their droppings are just left on the floor of the shed and bird droppings are strongly alkaline so when they mix with air and with moisture they form a caustic solution so if they were to spend long time sitting on this litter they would actually get caustic burns on their thighs uh so they can't really do that either um you know one Observer a veterinarian said it's like somebody with arthritis who's forced to stand uh you know all day or for the last uh 20 of their life so I think you know that's really a again a way of bringing up animals that um does takes no account of their well-being their suffering if it did we wouldn't breed birds that are so unsuited to um to the kind of thing that they are except for the fact that they put on weight quickly and you can make more money out of a faster growing bird than a slower growing bird what comes next which animals after the chickens uh well I think pigs would be the the next in terms of of quantity um and that's particularly so in China China is now the world's largest producer of pigs although countries like the United States have a lot of pigs as well um but uh you know pigs are also almost all kept indoors nowadays uh the uh they're also bred to grow very fast they're closely confined in pens uh the pigs that whose meat uh you know pork or ham or bacon you actually buy will have been kept in in small groups um but always indoors and with little room to move around the the worst situation is their mothers the the breeding sours whose role is just to produce litter after litter of piglets and they are still quite commonly kept in individual crates or stalls just metal bars too narrow for them to turn around and uh they're they've got no straw to bed down in there either on concrete floors or on metal slats because that's the easiest and cheapest way to hose off the manure uh so they have nothing to do these are you know pigs are very intelligent animals and uh comparable to dogs and yet they just locked up all day uh they have nothing to do except uh they do get fed and then maybe they consume their their food for half an hour or so and that's it um and if anybody kept a dog like that in in conditions where a dog couldn't run around or even turn around uh everybody would say that's cruel they ought to be prosecuted but because these are pigs because they come under commercial farming laws which typically um allow these practices uh not as I said not in the European Union and not in the United Kingdom not in California but in the states of the United States where most of the pigs are reared States like Iowa or Nebraska or North Carolina there's no such laws preventing them being kept in this way and in China there's there's no real animal welfare laws for farmed animal at all there are some laws relating to how they can be slaughtered but there's nothing no National laws about how they can be reared so I've seen photos of just vast sheds with rows and rows of these sounds standing in those stalls again just to reiterate here your position isn't that we should be cuddly towards animals because they're cute and they're nice and they're supposed to be walking around on a farmyard it's that there is an Associated amount of suffering that goes along with this and there is no reason that we as humans shouldn't care about the suffering of other animals that are on this planet especially I would imagine animals that we have brought into this world ourselves right we're fully responsible clearly for their welfare we do that very deliberately bring them into the world and then put them in these conditions um and that is really what I'm objecting to I'll also add that this is not an efficient way of feeding people some people will say well the world's population is growing you know we need to feed them we've got to do this but the truth is just the reverse this is a waste of food because when you take animals off the fields where they might get at least some of the food by themselves then um you have to feed them and to feed them I've already mentioned with the fish you have to go out and catch fish and grind them up for the carnivorous fish we we Farm anyway and for the chickens and pigs we have to grow grains or grow soybeans which we could eat ourselves and uh feed feed them to the animals and in the process the animal wastes most of the food value because the animal has to keep their body warm you burn up calories just to keep your body warm and even if they are very confined and can't really move around they still waste it varies a bit according to species but if we're talking about feeding grains to cattle they waste at least 90 percent of the food value if we're talking about pigs they probably weigh something like 60 to 70 percent of the food value if we're talking about chickens because they grow so fast they're a little more efficient they've perhaps waste two-thirds of the food value we get one third back so uh yeah it's um it's not a good way of feeding the world it's not a good way of preserving the planet what about the role of milk or eggs or cheese right yes well um the egg-laying hens uh again uh in those places I mentioned the European Union and some a few states of the United States they can't be kept in the wire cages that otherwise say the majority of U.S hens are kept in uh these very narrow wire cages where they can't stretch their wings um and uh uh so but even even where they're not kept in cages they can still be very crowded um and you know I think it you could say that in genuinely free-range egg production where the eggs where the hens are actually a large free to roam outside um and have grass that they can yeah you use and they can pack at insects in the grass or look for worms or something like that you know yes you can do that and you can produce eggs they're more expensive but you can produce eggs that way but the overwhelming majority of eggs come from hens who never go outside um and as I say in in many countries the majority are still in cages with dairy um there has again been a big move to intensify Dairy to produce have large dairies the traditional dairy farm maybe had 50 cows maybe 100 200 Cars would have been a decent sized dairy farm and they were able to go out each day on on grass and Grays and that's not too bad a life in itself but the larger fans with a thousand or more cars they essentially keep them in in stalls and they bring food to them but the other big problem with with dairy products which many people don't really think of is that the dairy cows have to be made pregnant at regular intervals to keep producing milk so roughly every year the cow will give birth to a calf and uh the calf is taken away from the cow within hours of birth because otherwise the calf will drink the milk that the producers want to sell so so the separation of the cow and and her calf is a painful process for both of them there's a very strong bond between cows and their calves and you know Dairy Farmers have acknowledged that sometimes when they're taking the calf away and then the cow calls for that car for hours and hours and sometimes even when the cow comes if the calf was taken away at a particular spot and the cow is taken past that spot the cow will stop and will call for a calf she remembers the calf being taken away and the fate of the calf isn't good either if if the calf is female she may be raised as a dairy cow herself but if the calf is male she's likely to go so he is likely to go into the veal industry or possibly be raised for hamburger but dairy dairy cows you know aren't really very good for meat production they're not bred for that I imagine that male chicks are similarly useless the male chicks of the laying breeds the egg laying breeds yes and they are generally just thrown into a kind of a grinder which grinds them up immediately after the after they're they're hatched and their their sex is selected the females are put on one side and the males get ground up there are some moves in Europe to develop technologies that um either enable you to sex the egg and therefore destroy the egg before the chick is hatched or even um enable it make it possible that the hand will only lay eggs of females and that would solve the problem of the male chicks uh and I say I think Germany and France are trying to legislate at least for the uh sexing in the in the egg rather than the chick to prevent the suffering of these millions of male chicks that get ground up uh but in the United States that isn't being done yet and then you know here where I'm in Australia it's not being done either I imagine that one of the most common objections after you put forward a case like that and you know by the sounds of things the life of these animals isn't tremendously enjoyable I don't think that anyone even the most Ardent meat-eater would say yeah I'm really proud of being part of a system that causes animals to go through that kind of situation but there are ways that we can do this we can look at regenerative farming we can ensure that chickens not only are free range but have a natural range they've got tons of hectares that they can go over is there a problem with eating an egg if it's been created by a chicken that's had a fantastic life that's been looked after that's been cared for protected from foxes the same thing goes for I'm sure there is a way that you can get milk from a cow that doesn't involve the emotional turmoil that they go through in your opinion are there any ways that you can do ethical animal farming there are ways that I think can be regarded as ethical um you can have a debate about whether they are as ethical or ethical enough to eat those products but but I think the debate is is an ongoing one and a reasonable one so while I'm not going to say I endorse those forms of animal production I am going to say I don't have a you know a conclusive objection to saying that they're wrong or that they shouldn't be done so for people who want to continue to eat animal products if they conscientiously search out those products I'm prepared to say yes they're they're trying to live an ethical life uh and and that's a reasonable attempt to do so um they'll probably be able to succeed with with free-range eggs depending a little bit where they're living um but you know there are free range eggs being sold in most countries labeled as such uh you may need to check up on how many hens there are per hectare or acre but it's possible uh don't kid yourselves that the hens will have a long life because once they stop laying which is you know well before the normal they would normally die um they will be killed I don't think many commercial producers will keep feeding hens who lay no eggs um the male chicks may still get killed that's another issue um and uh but with the dairy products it's really really hard to find Dairy Producers who leave their care they cut their calves with their cats um in animal Liberation now I think I mentioned three of them one in England one in Germany and one here in Australia uh the dairy products are a lot more expensive um but um yeah if people can do that um then okay uh still question of if if the cows are producing male calves uh what are you going to do with them are you going to keep them um but at least the Australian producer that I've had some contact with um uses uh sperm selection they use artificial insemination for producing the calves and they select the sperm and they get very very few male cows so that's one way of dealing with that um I think their their milk is about three times as expensive as milk from standard commercial producers so you have to be prepared to pay for it but if you really want to continue to eat animal products and you want to have an ethical relationship with animals um I guess that's one way of doing it think about how much more tasty all of that morality is going to be though that's really going to add on to the flavor profile yeah and I think people will appreciate it more that's true you know um I'm old enough to uh remember when I was a child when chicken was a treat because it was expensive and uh you know in my family you got it on your birthday um and you know it did it did seem something special then um I don't think many people think that chicken is a special treat now um but maybe if you only eat animal products from really animals who have really good lives and they're killed without pain and suffering uh you would eat these animal products quite rarely and you would think of them as a special treat and you would enjoy them more perhaps one of the uh progressions that I've seen from some of the more uh militant corners of the veganism movement is saying that owning any type of pet would be something which is unethical as well I think a lot of people struggle to understand how uh you know owning a dog that most people see not only is just uh something that they care about but literally a part of the family these people you know treat them as if they're essentially a surrogate child in fact some people decide not to have children in place of a ton of dogs or cats what is your position on the owning of pets uh I don't discourage people having I prefer to think of them as companion animals but I don't discourage people from living with companion animals um I don't like you know you said owning them well that is the legal situation of course now I'd I'd rather think of them as you said as members of the family and companions um I I don't think you would be able to own them in the same way that you don't own your son or daughter exactly yes that's right um but uh I do think that you know many people with companion animals do give them good and rewarding lives obviously not everybody but but many do and it's also I think important for our understanding of non-human animals uh I already mentioned earlier that people who live with dogs or cats have a sense that uh you know what they're like that they're complex beings that they not only feel pain if you tread on their paws but they have uh you know emotional suffering when they're they're bored when you leave them alone at home at least dogs aren't um and uh you know they welcome you when you come home and they love to go for a run and there's a lot of things that we learn about animals through being close to a dog or a cat or a horse um and and that has led many people on to appreciating that the way they're treating or the way they're complicit in the treatment of uh pigs and and cows and chickens uh is wrong um one of the perhaps you know the leading animal Advocate and strategist of the animal movement in the United States in the last quarter of the 20th century it was a man called Henry Spira who um was a close friend of mine and and he was somebody he was always like for Progressive causes he marched for civil rights in the American South um he was a merchant Seaman and joined a reformist union to try to improve conditions for workers after the Cuban Revolution he went there to see it himself what was happening but he had no thoughts about animals until a friend of his was going overseas said hey look after my cat I've got no one else to look after my cat here's a cat um and and the cat basically Charmed him as he says and suddenly he had this Epiphany that Harry was patting one animal and sticking a knife and fork into another um and uh was that something wrong with that and he happened to come across my animal Liberation at the same time and that combination started him off on a career that really improved lives for many animals have you considered the suffering of wild animals and whether it's our duty to somehow step in and I mean really write that I have considered that um I would say I was prompted to consider it by some other philosophers who started thinking about that issue I didn't really think much about it in the early versions of the book but I have a few pages about it in animal Liberation now uh I certainly think that we should consider the interests of wild animals and there are relatively simple things that we can do um the largest number of wild animals we harm is again fish and we harm them by hauling them out of the ocean in uh and letting them die in Cruel conditions because you know they will suffocate in nets for example or um die slowly so uh and we're overfishing the oceans so avoiding uh wild caught fish is good for wild animals and good for the sustainability of the oceans um and I think also things like um trying to install a glass that birds won't fly into that's another major killer of animals uh and I think you know if you do have a cat um keeping your cat indoors at least at night if not all the time depending where you live is important for wild animals because although you know many cat lovers deny it um there's very strong evidence that pretty much any cat left outside especially at night becomes a predator and kills uh you know small animals small birds uh small rodents um so yeah keeping keeping your cat indoors at night is a good way of reducing the suffering of wild animals if that's the case and you lived in an area let's say that was overrun with wild pigs there are some places in America that have this problem and some people get in big helicopters with 50 cal machine guns on the side of them and just chew through Reams and Reams and reams of animals how do you balance the ethical decision there if these animals were left they would destroy an ecosystem which Downstream from that has a ton of other animals that live in it the only interjection that we can make is to kill them but by doing that you're killing an animal in a pretty inhumane way on the side of a gunship loaded with a belt-fed machine gun yeah um we have similar problems with wild animals in Australia too uh look I I respect the environmental values that we want to preserve and uh it's our fault for having introduced these uh non-native species and uh they've escaped or they've sometimes they've been deliberately released to breed and and we've created this Havoc um it's obviously not the fault of the pigs but um I agree with those who think that uh you know there are at least some situations where we can't just let it go um I would like to see more Humane ways of dealing with a problem than the helicopter gunships that you mentioned uh so uh ideally we would put some research into developing a bait that will sterilize the animals and therefore that would deal with the problem more humanely over the long term interesting so yeah I mean in a very small scale that can be done there's a couple of islands uh in off the the Delmarva Peninsula in Maryland uh cincatika and Assateague I think they're called um where there was a problem with feral horses uh feral ponies and and people care more about horses than they do about pigs so uh when people said we need to shoot all these ponies uh people said no you can't do that um and then they they did find ways of of sterilizing them um but uh you know on a large scale over large territory uh you probably can't can't do that very easily at the moment but uh yeah you might be able to develop a bait that the pigs would take that the native animals would not take um and that would sterilize them yeah it's a it's a fascinating decision criteria there so I I got introduced to your uh position probably about four or five years ago from a friend and I am a me teacher I still am now but it's been by far for me the most compelling consideration around my consumption of animals where is it being sourced from how do I feel about eating it even little things I know that as a utilitarian this probably doesn't count but having a little bit more reverence for the food that you eat and for where it's come from um has been something that was that was changed upon understanding a more moral and ethical framework as opposed to a screechy person who was shouting about how terrible you are because and then some placard that gets waved in your face it seemed like a much more scalable um uh way of thinking about Animal Welfare given the fact that the net outcome that you're looking for is to just reduce animal suffering and you've been talking about this for nearly 50 years and are now revisiting it again what do you think about the modern iteration of the veganism movement and its sort of many hydra-headed uh version of of How It's progressed what have you observed that's been that's been interesting being on the front lines of this for so long yeah there are a lot of different tactics used um and uh it's hard to know which tactics are the most effective that's a difficult problem in in social science research to work out what influences people um I I'm perfectly clear that that really violent actions just put people off and give give the whole movement a bad name and I'm glad that they seem to have ceased there was a period in the 80s when some activists were using violence and you know relatively little I mean there was a lot of publicity about it um the number of people who were hurt by it was you could count on the fingers of your hand I think um but uh still it was not a good uh thing to be doing for an ethical movement um and the sort of in your face thing I guess you know yes people find it offensive we don't know whether it gets them to think in the end or not but um I've been impressed by the recent use of uh what's called open rescue techniques where people have gone into factory farms and videoed what's going on there and if they've seen particularly ill animals or particularly maltreated animals that looked like they were not going to survive very long anyway they've rescued them they've taken them at they've taken them through a vet um if if the vet says uh no this animal isn't going to live then uh they put them down but otherwise they treat them to try to help them and then they show uh the video footage and they show their individual animals because then people can focus on individuals um and it's interesting that the uh there's been a move to prosecute these people um because after all they are taking property pigs pigs or chickens whatever they are their property um and there have been a couple of recent cases where the prosecution has badly backfired uh so uh two two Rescuers took pigs from a farm in Utah and uh they were put on trial on felony theft charges I think they could have spent five years in in prison uh and they didn't deny that they'd taken the pigs um but the jury and and this is you know Utah's a fairly conservative State and they were in a rural part of the state you'd expect to be more conservative more farm friendly but the jury refused to convict them uh and then there was a second case in California after that too so it's a way of getting the randomly selected members of the public on the jury to express their view of what's going on in these places and it's clear that they don't like it in your opinion is it moral to convince people to become vegan through an immoral method so something like uh lying to them or emotional coercion or something like that no I don't think it is and I think it's likely to backfire because uh you know there will be people who will expose what's going on and let's say that it didn't in this situation let's say it didn't backfire let's say that the outcome was that nobody got rumbled but on route to doing it it was an immoral means to a moral end in your view well as a utilitarian I I do think that it is sometimes Justified to do things that would not be right in themselves but when they lead to importantly good ends can be justified so if you're talking hypothetically um I think that could be justified if you're talking about would I advise uh a vegan activist to use those methods the answer is no because you know we can't specify that it is only going to have the good consequences and not have the bad consequences yeah it's um it's an interesting an interesting consideration and one that I've spoken to a bunch of different friends about you mentioned before we discussed this um kind of spectrum I suppose between factory farming and regenerative farming and living at home with a chicken that lives in the backyard or whatever it seems to me that um factory farming is the thin end of the wedge that again most people that hear the stories about the kind of experiences that you've just described from animals very few of them are going to be Arden proud flag waving supporters of it um it does seem like that gets spread out to Inc to cover absolutely everything that it's not just the factory farming it's also the regenerative farming and lots of people I think are changing their eating habits because of a fear of environmental impact as well as just what's happening to animals and emotive imagery and stuff like that in your opinion do you think it's a almost a failing of moral philosophy to have sufficient impact that you need to rely on concerns about climate change and so on and so forth should it be the case that we are able to motivate humans morally without having to layer on top multiple different arguments it should be the case that the argument against inflicting suffering on animals is sufficient to persuade people um yes ideally that would be the case um when I Road and released uh and the first version of animal Liberation in 1975 I thought that this argument was so obvious and compelling that it would have that effect um that was a bit naive um but uh um ideally it would if we were more rational if we were more moved by ethics more ethical I'm sure it would uh but um you know in saying that I think the arguments about not eating meat because of climate change are also ethical arguments um they're not appealing to self-interest really because you know from self-interest to point of view what I would like is to keep doing what I like enjoy doing and hope that everyone else will stop doing these things that will have bad effects yeah yeah it's the tragedy of the commons exactly so um So to avoid the tragedy of the commons you either need government regulation um or you need individual ethical action we don't have government regulation that's taking the right stand on Industrial animal production yet um so we need ethical action why do you think it is the case that the argument you put forward 50 years ago that you thought as soon as everybody hears this evidently they they're going to change their ways this is going to be the beginning of a kind of diet virus that's going to cause everybody to become ethical why why why hasn't that convinced more people I think it's just that uh eating habits uh go very deep and are hard to change I mean the contrast here would be with some other ethical change like um the dramatic Improvement in attitudes towards uh gays and bisexual people and lesbians and so on um which you know I don't think many people so in the year 2000 I don't think many people thought that within the next 20 years a lot of countries would accept not only that we shouldn't prosecute uh guys for their sexual acts but that we should allow them to marry in this exactly the same way as we allow heterosexuals to marry um that was a dramatic change but there's less at stake for you know most people don't have very much at stake they have an attitude but they don't feel I'm going to have to change my lives my life it's the thing that you need to be gay it's saying that you need to align it's not saying you need to marry someone of your same sex if people tried that they would not get very far um but uh the the animal movement of the case that I was putting forward was saying you need to change what you eat um and that's much more difficult you know for a whole lot of reasons I mean there may be some sort of we evolve to have a taste for meat because that's a very dense nutrient that was available to our ancestors and those that ate it did better than those that didn't but because that's not the case anymore today it's it's more of a health risk um or it may be that it's it's embedded in our culture and you know we think oh but if I stopped eating meat I wouldn't have the traditional Thanksgiving turkey or uh whatever other you know wouldn't Slaughter the the sheep for the Feast of the eyed um so so meat is is culturally embedded in uh in ways that make it harder to change and there's also that sense of a lot of people say well you know their family eats meat what are they going to do when they go and eat with them um they are they going to tell their friends that they should stop eating meat isn't that being a bit self-righteous um it's you know we're fairly conformist in that uh there are some people who are prepared to say no I'm gonna break with that tradition and uh be it a non-conformist but I think there are a lot of people who don't want to be among the leaders of the change and would rather follow than lead given that vegetables and vegan products no matter how correctly they're sourced are also associated with an increase in death and suffering of animals stuff that happens just during harvesting and so on and so forth it's inevitable that that's going to end up happening does this not mean that there is a moral obligation for every human to try and limit their calorie consumption to as little as possible I shouldn't eat one calorie more than I should I should also eat a vegan diet but that vegan diet shouldn't be a single calorie over because as soon as I do that is unnecessarily impacting animal life Upstream I think if you really start worrying about every calorie you're going to go crazy and you're not going to be very effective in doing anything else um so I think that's you know that's some sort of saintly ideal if you like and it's similar to arguments that I've put forward in relation to Global poverty um again you know a long time ago when I was perhaps a little too much of a demanding ethicist that we should give away all of our assets until we reach the point of marginal utility and until we reach the point at which sharing something or giving something more to a person in extreme poverty would lower us to the same level of poverty or suffering as the person we were helping um that's also I think um you know not a realistic ethic to put forward and as a consequentialist I want to put forward ethical views that will achieve the maximum benefits so I no longer make that argument in terms of of how much we should give away I suggest instead say in my book the life you can save I suggest more reasonable percentages of incomes that scale up as you earn more and similarly I think in terms of you know trying to get people to move towards uh a vegan diet or at least a more conscientiously ethical diet that has concern for what animal is experiencing I think saying you can't eat a single calorie over what you need to maintain your body is uh is is not going to work for the people like me who aren't philosophy pilled talking about the blending of the position of a utilitarian with that of a consequentialist am I right in thinking that a utilitarian would be looking to maximize the utility from whatever the choices or the framework is that's being put forward but the consequentialist understands that there are real world restrictions on that that need to be filtered through so it's is it almost like a blending of the two positions no I don't think that's quite right I think that utilitarians will also want to produce the best consequences uh you know utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism consequentialism is the genus utilitarianism is the species and the difference between them is not um their attitudes to what's realistic or what's not it's their attitude to what are the consequences that we want to maximize that we want to focus on the utilitarian will say the consequences are uh well-being the well-being of all of those capable of having a well-being which means in my view all sentient creatures and we want them to suffer as little pain as possible to to suffer as little uh to experience as much pleasure to be as happy as possible that's the utilitarian view the consequentialist will say I agree that whether an action is right or wrong depends on its consequences but I don't think that well-being is the only consequence that matters I think it's for example it's good that people should have greater knowledge whether they use that knowledge to enhance well-being or not I think it's important that people should be free whether they use their freedom in ways that enhance well-being or not um and you know then there's a whole list and that's the thing about consequentialists in general once you move away from specifically utilitarian consequences there are about 50 things that people have put on lists that they think of as intrinsically good and they want to maximize and everybody then takes their pick of these 50 things as to which are the ones that I want to maximize and and why and and then you have to say well are you sure this is really good in itself you sure like with knowledge you sure knowledge isn't good because it can help us to improve well-being you're sure that just having additional knowledge is good even if has no further consequences those are the kinds of debates that they then have to have could you imagine a situation in which a human who was bought into the world of uh ethical veganism and was talking about this sort of stuff on the internet let's say or or on any kind of platform but was struggling to eat a sufficiently well-balanced diet that allowed them to maximize the impact that they could have on the world existed so this person believes in the precepts of it and is talking about it online and is doing it in a very compelling way and encouraging other people to consider their approach to what their diet looks like too but their individual um challenges that they're facing with their own health mean that they then consider moving from a vegan to a meat-based diet now whilst they're on this meat-based diet they're going to continue talking to the world and encouraging as many people as possible would it be a an ethical position for that person to hold to say look I'm going to do something personally which I would see as unethical or immoral in order to encourage and maximize the impact that I can have on the rest of the world yeah I've actually had that's not a hypothetical I've had people come to me and say things somewhat similar to that um I think you know it took me a while to accept this because I've always felt great on uh vegetarian and vegan diets um and others that I know have too but um there are some people who seem to have a different Constitution and who don't do well uh certainly not on an exclusively vegan diet so if you are one of those people and but you see the point of the cause um yeah I would say to preserve your health and to maintain the ability to be an active Force for good in the world um you should seek out those animal products that will be sufficient to maintain your your health and vigor and will do the least harm to animals to the climate and so on so for example we were talking earlier about free-range eggs from from hens who are genuinely free range and have grass to range around on uh um I think that's that's an example of something that I would see as doing minimizing harm providing some animal protein and maybe that's enough for some people you know if it's not then they need to look further but they always need to think about who is where can I get this product in a way where the animals are really cared for well uh where the greenhouse gases are not great or offset um so yeah those are the sorts of questions and I appreciate that a small number of people may need to do that to keep active and vigorous loads of muscles just tons but generally you don't need messy muscles oh muscles I see those muscles right so yeah eating enough animal products to build up their muscles and in fact yes you could do that yes that would be uh go to town go to town on the buy valves okay so um obviously one of the things that you've done uh nearly 50 years between both between this version and the first version of this the cultural climate has changed an awful lot during that time the type of arguments that can be made that are accepted widely uh or even accepted not so widely uh have changed a good bit what were some of the um elements that you had to remove from the book in order to make it more palatable for a 2023 audience well um a very glaring example of that was that in the first version of the book um I wanted to make the point at the beginning that this book was not written for animal lovers and that I didn't consider myself an animal lover and that was raising a major ethical issue and to make that point I used a parallel between uh this issue and uh or or the way that I was approaching this issue and the way that uh whites in the 1950s and 60s who were supportive of the movement against racial segregation in the American South um would go down to march with uh Blackson assass for you know against segregation of schools or universities or buses or restaurants or whatever and uh to make the point that I know I was not an animal lover I said I quoted uh an epithet that was often used by white racists so against these by white Southern racist against these Northerners who came down to help them and they used the n-word to suggest that they loved the people that they were helping um and I and I had that in the first edition I had that word in quotes um it was a quote and I said it was a racist who was saying this there was no way at all in which I was endorsing the use of that word um but now that word has become such a strong taboo that you can't even use it in quotes in that sense and um so that editor uh indicated that that they had to go and I accepted that view yeah I think if if no matter how um clean you want or how uh appropriately you want to try and represent the original material you're inevitably gonna have to do that there's a couple of other bits as well that I'd seen um to do with uh men getting the ability of men to have equal abortion rights or the equal um was it access to opportunity something like that yes that's right I was saying that yes I was saying that to say that animals have rights didn't mean that they had the right to vote or something like that um any more than um to say that uh there's a right to abortion means that men uh have equal abortion rights with women or some something like that I can't remember the exact wording um yes and uh of course now you can't refer to pregnant women you should refer to pregnant people uh as the Fraud's conversation I still find that a little strange I must say but well thinking about this situation and this is what particularly fascinated me about it you're a man who is famous for his cold analytical approach and you have had to remove some very powerful arguments that I've heard friends use I've heard friends use that exact argument about the access to abortion and and men's rights to abortion you've had to remove some powerful Arguments for the life of animals because of modern sensitivities is that I mean what what do you think that says about our current ethical position in the modern world well I think it says that perhaps we're we're too sensitive um about some of these issues and we we should be more prepared to face some of these realities but um I went along with the editor's suggestions on on these issues because this book is about a particular cause a particular issue I want to attract as wide support as I possibly can because of the urgency to stop what we're doing to uh to say hundreds of billions of sentient creatures and damaging our climate um and I didn't want to get distracted by a small side issue where people would say oh hijacking I'm not going to buy that book yeah I'm not going to read that book you've got to decide which Wars you can fight right you can't fight all the wars at the same time yeah I understand so one other modern discussion that probably wasn't a consideration when you first wrote this book was Ai and over the last six months we've seen a huge Resurgence in discussions about it it kind of really lulled you know Nick Bust from Super intelligence was 2014 something like that I think and that really kind of kicked off this concern about pay-per-clip maximizers and Alignment problems and machine extrapolated volition and then it went quiet for forever because it didn't seem like AI was making any progress and then Chachi PT comes out and everything goes ballistic again have you considered the potential for AI agents to suffer and our obligations to them yes absolutely um I have thought about that and in fact with some others I'm organizing a Princeton a conference at Princeton University in uh October um which will include that topic as well as talking about the impact that AI is having on animals which is significant because uh some industrial Farms are now being basically run by AI rather than you know by individual humans in the same way uh plus of course there's all these decisions or dilemmas about self-driving cars and do you program them to Swerve to avoid the dog or only to Swerve to avoid the child um so I have been involved in AI ethical questions and my answer to the question you asked about uh could there be conscious AI could AI be a sentient being um and if so what would moral status be I think the answer is in principle AI could be sentient or conscious I don't think we have got close to that yet I think that chat gbt uh sort of fools us into thinking we're chatting with a sentient being but when we understand what it's actually doing and how it's regurgitating some of the material that it's fed on and how it adjusts uh I think we realize that there's no reason to postulate any Consciousness but if if that did happen and in principle it's possible to happen then we would need to give that AI a moral status um at least like that of animals and depending on its cognitive abilities maybe it would be closer to to that of most humans have you considered or thought of a way in which an AI agent would be able to convince you that it was having a felt sense of an experience because you can I mean five-year-old girls have got dolls that will cry if they're not picked up sufficiently frequently nobody is mistaking the doll for having the felt experience of being lonely but you know you roll it all the way down and it seems to me I haven't thought about this a lot but it seems to me that it would be very difficult to separate out AI agent performing what emotions look like from conscious agent experiencing them basically is every AI just a p zombie in disguise with with circuit boards uh so far um but uh yeah the question of how we're going to know is is really an interesting and important question because uh you know many years ago Alan Turing said uh if you can have a conversation with the robot and you don't know whether you're having a conversation with a robot or with a real person then we should assume it's conscious but that is the case with chat GPT I mean abstractable people into thinking that so uh I don't and yet as I say once you understand what it's actually doing what it's programmed to do I think you don't think it's it's conscious now um the problem is that these AIS are learning all the time developing all the time and I think we're going to get it into the situation where they're going to be producing other AI right that they're they're getting to be smart enough to design other systems and uh then we won't really know how the other system works in the way that we might know about the ones so far and uh it'll be very difficult to deter whether to tell whether it is conscious or not um because it's not simply a matter of of saying you know looking at the the algorithms there because because it's it's learning things and developing so uh yeah I'm I'm not really an expert in this field um I've talked to some people who have more expertise than me um and I've started to see the difficulty of this problem I had Stuart Russell on the show 18 months ago and he wrote human he's written everything he wrote literally the textbook on AI it's in some ungodly number of languages and um he was saying if you were a lot of the time uh YouTube will be asked open up the algorithm show us what the algorithm is doing or tell us tell us how the algorithm works and especially when you're looking at something like YouTube his argument was the engineers at YouTube don't know what the YouTube algorithm is doing it's got its own optimization um function that it is aiming for it is trying to maximize time on site and click through and watch time and they just set this bunch of parameters and then it's run away and it is now reinforcing okay let's do this a little bit more let's change for that select for this kind of video Once someone does this then do this and you realize that yeah I mean if you've got recursive self-improving AI that are creating either improving themselves or creating further agents that are their own uh progeny in one form or another I mean you definitely don't know two degrees removed but even just one degree removed what you've created after a sufficiently long amount of time learning is probably not really going to resemble what it was that you made it in the first place so yeah getting in there and going oh well you know we'll just see where's the emotion algorithm we didn't put the emotion algorithm in here therefore it can't you know the sadness the sadness code doesn't exist within this I think it's a a really really and I fundamentally to me that seems to be the most interesting and the most challenging question that's going to come up about this at what point are we going to say that an an AI agent claiming Consciousness sentience the ability to suffer etc etc are we ever going to know because the only reason really that you believe that I have the capacity to suffer that if you poke me with a pin that I'm not just saying ow performatively because I know that that's what you would do and there's everybody else on the planet is just some big robot that's been here to Truman Show Truman Show Peter singer's life for the last however many decades the only reason is that we we kind of have this Faith right between us and we we believe that that's the case very very difficult with no proof no one has ever been an AI agent that has a felt sense of this and we can't use our theory of mind to to try and believe it I think that's going to be I think that's going to be the biggest challenge that we face yeah I think that's a huge challenge I agree and I don't have an answer to it um come on Peter I don't know how anyone does but I say ai ai Liberation now that's why that's what I've come for um right well look Peter Singer ladies and gentlemen Peter I really appreciate you you have got a tour of some kind that you are doing that people can attend where is that and when's it happening I do have a speaking tour yes I'm going to be speaking in Washington DC on May the 26th in Los Angeles on the 29th in San Francisco on the 30th of May and in in New York City on June 1st and in London on June 4th um and you can find that if you Google uh an evening with Peter Singer and maybe put in think Inc uh think and then Inc which is the organization that is organizing the tour you'll get information and tickets and I would love to see you all there and uh get a chance to speak to you and to hear your questions Peter I really appreciate you thank you for today thanks very much what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best 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